Puglia is what happens when a place stays poor long enough to stay honest. While the Amalfi coast performed for the cameras, the heel of Italy kept farming, kept fishing, and kept cooking the way it always had. It quietly ended up with the best olive oil on the continent.
The anchor is cucina povera, the peasant cooking that turns almost nothing into everything. Orecchiette made by hand on a doorstep in Monopoli. Vegetables that taste like a different food group. A grandmother whose recipe has no measurements because her hands are the measurements.
Between meals: whitewashed villages stacked over turquoise coves, working masserie behind ancient stone walls, and ceramic workshops where the same families have thrown clay for centuries. Liz learns the pasta from the hands that own it, and finds out why the simplest food in Italy is the hardest to make.
